UB researchers awarded $1.6 million grant to probe human virome

When it comes to viruses, it’s long been the case of the naughty kid getting all the attention. For decades, scientists have focused primarily on the viruses that cause human illness, including influenza, chicken pox and COVID-19.

Much less is understood about the numerous viruses in our bodies that are not associated with any type of disease.

UB researchers representing three schools and a center are studying these very viruses and how combining laboratory methods and artificial intelligence (AI) can help identify them.

Their project received a $423,366 grant from the National Institutes of Health. It’s a four-year renewable grant totaling $1.6 million.

“Healthy humans are full of trillions of viruses. Studying them is challenging because they are far more diverse than bacteria and it can be hard to see ‘who’ is there and discern what they are doing in the body,” says Kathryn Kauffman, assistant professor in the Department of Oral Biology, School of Dental Medicine.

Along with Kauffman, the UB team includes Yinyin Ye, assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and Jun Qu, professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, School of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

Ye will bring her expertise in concentrating and purifying viruses from wastewater and viral proteomics. Meanwhile, Qu will share his experience using a state-of-the art mass spectrometer, which is located in the Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics and Life Sciences’ (CBLS) Proteomics and Bioanalysis Core.

Their research is part of the NIH Human Virome Program (HVP), a consortium involving more than 300 researchers across the country who are working to improve scientists’ understanding of the role viruses play in the healthy human body. The virome is the entire collection of viruses living within the human body.

To ferret out the hidden viruses, the team will collect viral samples and process them in a way that removes a dominant group of viruses that normally “swamp out” the signal from other viruses.

“Through multiple steps, we hope to concentrate viruses that were previously ignored, and we’ll do DNA and RNA sequencing and protein characterization,” Ye explains.

The UB team will use a source of viruses that is plentiful and rich in diverse viruses present in healthy humans — wastewater. Using wastewater accelerates the development of tools for general study of the human virome, and also holds potential future benefit for public health studies.

“From the engineering side, if we better understand the viruses associated with healthy humans,” Ye says, “we can apply this knowledge and leverage wastewater-based epidemiology to monitor for anomaly signals and provide early warning for community-wide disease outbreaks.”